Everyday Was Trash - Albums in 2018
There was a time when I wasn’t even able to name 10 albums
that I liked enough, within a year, to make one of these stupid year-end lists.
In 2014, after only, like, four months on the job at the newspaper, coupled
with a family member who was having health issues, I could feel myself
beginning to slowly decline into the depths of a serious depressive episode—and
in pushing myself to try to make a year-end list, I could only name eight
albums; the following year, in 2015, I could only name seven.
I was able to pull it together enough, despite my best
efforts, to put together lists of an even 10 in 2016 and 2017; this year,
despite how awful I have felt for a majority of it, I started putting together
my ‘shortlist’ of albums for consideration, and I found that I couldn’t quite
make it to 20, but I had, like, 17 or 18.
For a while I thought about calling this piece, ‘You Are All
My Favorites.’
But that’s not how this works.
I listened to a lot of albums this year. Many of them were
released this year—2018. Some of them I even bothered to write reviews of.
After deliberation, I was able to select an even-ish 15 that I could put my
seal of approval on—a list that blends things that I hope are both
representative of this time, as well as timeless.
Opting to not to follow up his breakout The Party with another solo outing, Canadian singer and songwriter
Andy Shauf gathered his long gestating band Foxwarren for a series of short,
intimately recorded sessions where the four-piece committed to tape its debut
effort.
Stepping back from the kaleidoscopic, Beatle-esque pop music
of The Party, Shauf and Foxwarren head
into a relatively diverse, yet somehow cohesive sound across the record’s 10
tracks. There’s an overarching ‘1970s arty folk-rock’ feeling to a bulk of Foxwarren, but that doesn’t stop them
from steering, ever so slightly, into a surprisingly tense groove on
“Everything Apart,” or unnerving psychedelia on “Lost in The Dream.”
A startlingly enjoyable listen from beginning to end—there
is seriously not a bad song among the bunch—the real standouts include the
album’s accessible, infectious opening track, “To Be,” and the late arriving
“Sunset Canyon,” which is the kind of homage to the album’s overall sound that
could have wound up sounding derivative, but in the hands of such a capable and
tight sounding band, it arrives incredibly sincere.
I first encountered Mix-O-Rap’s absolutely wild Eyes of A Key in the spring, and it’s
the kind of record that totally caught me off guard—both by the music itself
(lo-fi doesn’t even describe just how raw it sounds) as well as the album’s
compelling back-story.
Recorded while Mix-O was incarcerated, Eyes of A Key is the result of a meticulous attention to detail in
order to achieve this kind of a sound. Using the music room within the prison
he was sentenced to, Mix-O, who may or may not be a man named Billy
Littlejohn-Bey, went to great lengths to achieve this kind of aesthetic—the
specifics of which are documented in press materials that accompany the album,
released via the esoteric Washington D.C. label People’s Potential Unlimited.
When I was beginning the absolutely arduous task of picking
my favorite records of the year, I placed Eyes
of A Key on the turntable and before putting the needle down, I wondered,
“Is this record one of my favorites of the year?” The first side hadn’t even
finished yet, and I had my answer.
Infectious and hypnotic in its simplicity, it is without a
doubt one of the strangest records I have ever heard, but that doesn’t stop it
from being an absolute joy to listen to, packed to the brim with a sense of
energy and urgency that never relents.
Her seventh full-length solo album in a 20+ year career, Hell-On is a lot of things—it’s a lot to
take in, right down to the drastically unsettling cover art, and the stark
imagery found within the album’s lavish liner notes.
Written, in a sense, as a response to the fire that claimed
her home while on tour, as well as her struggle to remain anonymous in the way
the story of her house fire was reported within her community due to a stalker,
Hell-On is nothing if not ambitious,
personal, and complexly arranged. It’s nowhere near as immediate in its
accessibility when compared to her previous solo outing from 2013, The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight,
The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You—though the accessibility is
revealed over time. It’s the kind of album that you have to have patience with,
initially, because the album’s first track keeps the listener at an arm’s
length.
Spanning almost an hour, structurally Hell-On tends to get weighed down after the halfway mark, save for,
hands down, its finest moment—Case’s dramatic reinterpretation of the Crooked
Fingers song “Sleep All Summer.” With that being said, the album is more or
less frontloaded with its best material, including the rollicking, though
rather serious in subject matter, “Last Lion of Albion,” the swooning and
emotional pull of “Hall of Sarah,” the girl group throwback “Bad Luck,” and the
relatively straightforward, yet no less potent “Gumball Blue.”
Within recent memory, Snail Mail frontwoman Lindsay Jordan
engaged in a short back and forth with some rando—an older white man (but of
course)—on Instagram, who more or less, told her she needed to smile.
The exchange began because the man in question grew weary of
seeing photos of Jordan fronting the band where she always appeared to be
forlorn. She posted screen caps of the diatribe on Twitter—where he claimed she
had an “’I didn’t get my allowance’ scowl.”
The man in question, who posts an awful lot of photos of a
hideous newborn baby on his Instagram page, is probably not within the
demographic for Jordan’s musical output.
In a year where young (usually sad) women dominated indie
rock, Jordan’s arresting debut full-length as Snail Mail, Lush, is full of forlorn scowling, yes, but that’s the point.
Juxtaposing a ramshackle, youthful, and sneering indie rock aesthetic with
minor detours into swooning dreaminess, Jordan showcases both her knack for
infectious, well-written pop songs, as well as moments of tension and drama.
Jordan more or less splits Lush in half while walking
the line between both aesthetics, and finding the spaces where they are able to
converge. On tracks like “Habit,” “Let’s Find An Out” and “Anytime,” she weaves
evocative imagery to create compelling yet ambiguous narratives; and on singles
like “Pristine” and “Speaking Terms,” isn’t afraid to craft huge pop hooks.
Fully appreciating Kamasi Washington’s sophomore LP, Heaven
and Earth—a sprawling double LP spread across four pieces of vinyl, plus
the additional five song EP housed in the center of the album’s packaging—takes
time; lots of time. It takes time to make it through all of that music, but it
also takes time to unpack all the weight and complexities of the album as a
whole.
Not as immediately accessible as its predecessor, The Epic, Heaven and Earth is the kind of album that reveals slowly, and deliberately, which is an interesting contrast to the music housed within the album—songs that, occasionally, arrive at a frenetic, breakneck pace.
There were moments that, originally, I wasn’t 100% sold
on—like “Vi Lua Vi Sol,” which features heavily vocoded lead vocals from
Washington’s keyboard player, Brandon Coleman, or even the album’s first single
(and first track), the stuttering, bombastic, rhythmic, and lyric-heavy “Fists
of Fury.” And even after, like, six or seven months of listening to this thing,
I’m still not sold on “Fists of Fury,” but I’ve eventually warmed up to the
inclusion of Coleman’s spaced out vocals echoing over the top of “Vi Lua.”
Throughout Heaven and
Earth, Washington, as a bandleader, saxophonist, and an arranger, works almost
effortlessly to keep the tempest under his control. When I was discussing
Washington once with my boss, she said he was the kind of jazz musician who
played, ‘all the notes.’ And she’s not wrong—sometimes there is just entirely
too much happening in a piece, and it’s difficult to know where, if anyplace,
you are supposed to direct your focus.
But in all that cacophony, there are moments of sheer
beauty, which has become one of Washington’s trademarks—“The Space Travelers
Lullaby” is by far the album’s most gorgeous piece, as is the shuffling, mildly
reserved “Song for The Fallen.”
The music Tom Krell has spent the last eight years releasing
under the How to Dress Well moniker has always been intently personal, but his
fifth full-length, The Anteroom, is
perhaps his most personal today, as
well as his most ambitious artistic endeavor.
A complete turn around from the Technicolor pop music he
crafted on 2016’s Care, Krell has
returned inward to the dark and cavernous places that he occupied during How to
Dress Well’s earliest days; now, however, he’s armed with a much larger budget
for music production, as well as much larger vision for the kind of music he
wants to make.
Comprised of 13 ‘tracks,’ The Anteroom is intended to be listened to from beginning to end,
uninterrupted—save for if you are flipping the record over. It’s a
self-referential song cycle that continually connects ideas and themes from the
moment is starts until the final, volatile moments of “Nothing.”
Blending icy minimalism with 1990s electronic inspired beats
and synths, Krell has made a record for people in the club who want to cry more
than dance. The Anteroom is a
reflection on two years in Trump’s America, Krell’s own relocation to Los
Angeles, as well as a period of time he refers to as a ‘cosmic loneliness,’ and
a stark rumination on the idea of the ‘self’—full of poignant insight and
thoughtful observations on the human condition in 2018.
Grid of Points,
Elizabeth Harris’ first Grouper album since 2014’s haunting Ruins, almost barely constitutes an
‘album’—it’s seven tracks and slightly over 20 minutes in length; oh, and the
last track, “Breathing,” ends with a few minutes of the sound from a train
passing by.
Serving as a slight companion piece to Ruins, simply because they are both cut from the same sonic
cloth—sad piano records—Grid of Points
plunges the listener even deeper into the isolated atmosphere Harris has
created. While some of her earliest work as Grouper tended to drift into what
could be called ‘experimental folk,’ here, it’s easier to at least identify
that a song is taking place—you can hear her fragile voice, barely rising above
a whisper, as well as the very deliberately restrained plunking of piano keys.
However, there’s still a curtain around it all that keeps
you, the listener, at an arm’s length. Harris is willing to let you in only so
far, and by drenching everything in a rather cavernous, claustrophobic sounding
reverb, still creates something that leaves you with more questions than
answers. Everything sounds distant, but like you are almost on the cusp of
understanding—e.g you can tell she’s singing, but can’t really make out the
words thanks to the way the album is recorded and produced.
And that’s the point—it’s incredibly devastating, pensive,
and also mysterious.
There’s nothing as immediately gorgeous and overwhelming as
the proper opening track to Ruins,
“Clearing”—however, throughout the very concise running time of Grid of Points, Harris has no time to
waste when creating an atmosphere that pulls on your emotions—there’s a way
that her vocals overlap and reverberate out on “Driving” that stops me in my
tracks every time, or the absolutely heartbreaking tension that she creates
near the end of the record on “Blouse.”
One of the things that make Federico Durand such a
fascinating artist working within the ambient and experimental genres is just
how diverse he is as a performer. You can hear this diversity implemented from
album to album—whether it is something released as part of a collaboration with
another artist, or one of his solo outputs; nothing ever really sounds the
same, but they all have that familiarity to them that let you know it’s a
product of Durand’s work.
Durand’s latest release—and only effort released in 2018,
and a title that literally translates to the kind of music he makes (Little Melodies)—finds him showcasing
that diversity within one place.
Assembled in tandem with a book of photographs and released
via the prestigious IIKKI label, Pequeñas
Melodías is a short batch of compositions that you wish would never end.
The finds Durand stretching his abilities as a performer and really shifting
sonic tonalities from piece to piece, and it really hits its stride within the
middle section. “Los Juguetes De Minka Podhájská,” “Racimos De Luz,” and “Anís”
is a pitch perfect three track run, effortlessly spanning across Durand’s
palate of sounds, including a hypnotic, decaying, slightly manipulated guitar
loop; sustained, emotionally evocative, and alternating synthesizer tones; and
melancholic, yet hopeful, glistening, rippled tones, casting a warm, Instagram
worthy sunset on everything it touches.
From the pummeling second it opens, all the way through to
its final, swooning moments, On Dark
Horses is an album that never relents. A short collection of eight songs
(seriously, what was with really short albums in 2018?) Rundle finds a way to
blend a torrent of roaring, distorted guitars alongside an overall foreboding
nature, and still manages to write moments that have gigantic hooks—in some
cases, like on the album’s opening track, “Fever Dream,” the refrain of the
song absolutely soars. In other cases, like “Darkhorse,” the song’s refrain,
while peppered with a tangible darkness, still manages to be infectious.
Even when the pacing of the album begins to slow down after
the midway point, Rundle’s otherworldly, haunted howl never ceases in its
emotional resonance. Based on the title alone, even before you hear the music,
it should be apparent that On Dark Horses
is a dark record, full of a palpable tension and release that still cuts
through every time you listen.
The thing about the self-titled release from British rapper
Manonmars—born Jack Richardson—is that, the more I listen to it, the more I
realize just how clever of an album, lyrically, it is.
The arresting debut from Richardson, who has slowly been
building his profile over the course of many years and is now a part of the
experimental and atmospheric Young Echo collective, Manonmars juxtaposes two worlds that rarely intersect—moody electronic
music and rap—and pushes them together in such a way that creates fascinating,
often brilliant results.
Spread across 14 tracks (four of which are short
instrumental pieces from Richardson’s producers O$VMV$M) rarely do you find a
piece on this self-titled release that doesn’t have you doing a double take or
laughing out loud at the stoic, deadpan sense of humor with which these lyrics
are delivered—in revisiting the album for this end of the year write up, the
stream of consciousness, rhymed references of both a Panasonic video camera and
Sonic The Hedgehog in “Getaway” really hit me this time around, even though I
had already heard it a handful of times before.
A record that sticks around just long enough to not wear out
its welcome, but leaves you desperate for more, Manonmars is the sound of an rap artist who is willing to take
dramatic, intelligent chances within a genre that can rapidly turn stagnant.
A surprisingly jaunty collection of emotionally driven
tunes, Lucy Dacus rose out of what could have been, more or less, indie rock
obscurity thanks to inking a deal with Matador, her inclusion in the super
group boygenius, and this album, Historian, her second full length
release.
A spry 10 song set, Historian cemented itself as one
of this year’s finest albums thanks to Dacus’ ability to craft evocative
imagery alongside real, tangible emotion into her lyrics, the contrast in
dynamics she has a performer (the sudden direction and tonal change in “Night
Shift” still floors me every time, even after so many months), and the
bombastic, ambitious arrangements on the album—the addition of horns and
strings at important moments helps add to the weight of these songs.
Historian is, however, not a flawless; the pacing, at times, can drag slightly as it shifts into its middle section, though Dacus and her band manage to keep the surprising bursts of noise and energy coming in an effort to rejuvenate things as it heads into its penultimate track—the cathartic, personal “Pillar of Truth.”
Creating an ambiance as stark as the black and white
photograph on the album’s front cover, Paraffin
is one of the darkest, most claustrophobic rap records I’ve encountered in a
very, very long time—this fact also makes it one of the finest of the year.
The work of independent rappers and producers Billy Woods
and Elucid (born Chaz Hall) Paraffin
is the third full-length that the duo has collaborated on as Armand Hammer, and
from the moment the frenetic drum sample of its opening track, “Sweet Micky”
kicks in, all the way through to the pensive, slow motion, dreamy moments of
the album’s closing song, “Root Farm,” Paraffin
is unremitting in its ability to sustain the tone that the duo has worked so
naturally to create.
An absolutely surreal blend of humor, storytelling, and
stream of thought lyricism, backed by a combination of both gritty, snarling
beats as well as abstracted, atmospheric tones that run throughout the album,
Hall and Woods don’t so much play off of one another as performers, but
understand how to create a give and take with how much, or how little, they
each contribute to a piece.
Paraffin is the
kind of album that proves that there are still compelling things happening in
rap music, but also shows that the idea of hip-hop culture is still alive and
well.
There was, really, no way that this was going to fail.
Taking the aforementioned Lucy Dacus, a critical darling fresh
off the release of Historian, and
place her in a ‘super group’ with her friends, musical contemporaries, and
critical darlings Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker—there was literally no way
that the three of them would come up with anything that was less than
incredible.
By this point, I feel like everybody should know the history
of how boygenius formed, but maybe that’s because so much has been made of this
trio—and rightly so. Or maybe it’s because I’ve written about them at least
three times since the announcement of this self-titled EP that I feel like I
may be repeating myself.
A co-headlining tour between Bridgers and Baker, with Dacus
serving as ‘support’ was already booked when the trio decided to head into the
studio together—each artist brought a mostly finished song to donate to the
group, with each of them bringing in ideas for three additional songs that were
written in a more collaborative way.
The resulting six-song effort finds the three artists making
familiar contributions, as well as being provided with the opportunity to
expand, or experiment, within the group setting. “Bite The Hand” has the
ferocity of the pen of Lucy Dacus; “Me and My Dog” has the macabre send of
humor only Phoebe Bridgers can provide; and “Stay Down” is boiling over with an
emotional drama that has become Julien Baker’s trademark—only now she’s backed
by a full band, rather than selling all that emotion on her own.
But it’s the group’s collaboratively written pieces that are
among this collection’s finest, and most surprising—like the haunting closing
track, “Ketchum, ID,” which finds the trio singing around one microphone as
Bridgers strums the guitar, or my favorite track, the somber, shuffling
folk-tinged “Souvenir.”
Do you want boygenius
to be a full-length release rather than an EP? Of course. Do you hope that this
wasn’t just a one-off thing in support of their joint tour? Absolutely. No
matter what comes of this though, boygenius
is important—not only for already rising careers of Daucus, Baker, and
Bridgers, but for young women working in independent music, and perhaps without
knowing it at the time, the formation of boygenius and the recording of these
six-songs has gone onto become something much larger than itself.
Leave it to Earl Sweatshirt, one of the marquee name,
breakout stars from the Odd Future collective, to slide in to one of the final
months of the year and deliver one of the most dizzying, ambitious, and
startlingly innovative records of 2018.
Born Thebe Neruda Kgositsile, record critics who already
completed their ‘best of’ lists for 2018 were more than likely kicking
themselves for not being able to include Earl’s third proper full-length, Some Rap Songs, near the top of those
lists—it is an absolute game changer for Earl Sweatshirt as a rap artist, but
it also is daring enough to challenge, and change, the sound of rap music in
general.
Some Rap Songs
never really lets up—from the moment it begins, with an excerpt of James
Baldwin speaking, to the chopped up and warped sample of “Riot!,” a jazz song
written and performed by Kgositsile family friend Hugh Masekela, the album
itself is meant to be listened to as a whole, and the irony of the title
shouldn’t be lost on you, the listener, since it certainly isn’t lost on Earl
Sweatshirt. One would expect a rapper to put together an album of ‘rap songs,’
but what he’s done is weave what is, more or less, a collage—15 individual
vignettes that, surprisingly, never feel like they are unfinished sketches that
could have been developed more; no, far from it.
The brevity of Some
Rap Songs is surprising at first—25 minutes total, the longest track is
also the album’s opener, “Shattered Dreams”—clocking in at slightly over two
minutes. But the brevity of the album is premeditated, and within each track, the
short track lengths makes the material found within that much more urgent and
immediate. The intent is that you sit down with the album and listen to it all
the way through, immersing yourself in the dense world Earl has worked to
create.
Earl’s last full-length, I
Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside was a stark meditation on death and
grieving, mental health, and substance abuse; he covers those issues again on Some Rap Songs, but through the lens of
an additional three year passage of time filled with additional loss as well as
additional darkness. His outlook isn’t bleak—I mean, look at the times we are
living in. “Everyday was trash,” he
raps on the album’s second single, “The Mint.” And he’s right—I have seen so
many trash days in 2018.
At age 24, Earl Sweatshirt has already lived a thousand
lives, and may go on to live a thousand more. With Some Rap Songs, he has created what may be his definitive artistic
statement—a self-contained, cohesive set of self-referential ‘songs,’ backed by
mind bending and innovative beats, all with the intent to say that there is no
cure for the human condition, but maybe you shouldn’t give up just yet.
Writing these ‘year end’ lists is, truthfully, kind of a
pain in the ass, for a number of reasons—like, making the list to begin with is
no easy task, but the real issue is a matter of time.
It’s difficult, especially at the end of December when
members of your family want to see you (for some reason) or you’re busy working
or whatever, to carve out that extra time to write about albums you’ve already
written about once in a year.
After making this year’s list, sitting down with each record
again, and then finding more nice things to say about them—I realized I had
made, what I deemed to be, some mistakes with the way I had ordered the albums,
and had time to switch things around; however, there was no doubt, at any
point, that Mitski’s Be The Cowboy
was going to be my favorite record of 2018.
One of the things that made Be the Cowboy such an important record—not only for this year, but
for the career of Mitski Miyawaki, is just how diverse it is. Long gone are the
days of Miyawaki screaming into the pick up of her electric guitar during the
taping of a NPR ‘Tiny Desk’ concert; similarly, gone are the thrashing, and
howling moments like Puberty 2’s “My
Body’s Made of Crushed Little Stars.”
All of that has been replaced, at least for now, with a
startling maturation in songwriting as well as in arranging. Be The Cowboy is bombastic and layered
in ways that are difficult to describe. No two songs sound the same, but the
album as a whole is a cohesive set, loosely connected by a theme that runs from
beginning to end—the idea of ‘love.’
Don’t get it twisted, though; Be The Cowboy is not an album of ‘love songs.’ It is an album
comprised of songs about love—meaning some of them are filled with yearning,
some of them are full of anticipation, some of them are full of regret, and
some of them are devastating.
Just as Miyawaki is no longer content to be the girl with a
guitar, screaming into it, or over the top of it while she strums out harshly
distorted chords, Be The Cowboy
documents her ascension into what can only be called ‘pop music for adults.’ Be The Cowboy is pop music—not the kind
of garbage you hear on Top 40 radio, but accessible and at times infectiously
written music that has heart—deep heart, in many cases—that resonates with the
listener and stays with them, in their thoughts, long after the record has
finished.
Just as this is an album of songs about love, but not love
songs, referring to Be The Cowboy as
a pop record shouldn’t be confused for, say, what Annie Clark did with her 2017
St. Vincent release MASSEDUCTION—Technicolor,
electrified pop music that was focused more on substance and spectacle rather
than the content itself. Miyawaki may pepper a song with a jaunty horn
arrangement, or throw in a grand sweeping bit of strings—and yes, even her live
performances have become more theatrical, but she, at no point on Be The Cowboy, lets things get out of
control.
Of all the records this year that explored the human
condition, Be The Cowboy was perhaps
the most human of them all, simply
because it is an album about love—the bad, the good, the mundane. It’s human
because Miywaki, as a songwriter, creates incredibly vivid portraits within her
lyrics; maybe none of these things have happened to her, but you believe it
when, on “Old Friend,” she meets an old lover for coffee; or when she meets a
different old lover but winds up falling back into bed with them on “Lonesome Love”; or
when she needs affection and remembrance from someone while on the road, on
“Remember My Name.”
You’re right there with her as she pleads, “You’re the one I want,” on the album’s
torrential and powerful opening track, “Geyser,” and you’re there, in a sad
high school gymnasium, watching two people struggle through their unspoken
desires on the album’s absolutely heartbreaking final moment, “Two Slow
Dancers.”
From the first moment I heard it, shortly before its release
in August, until right now, there was never another record in 2018 that came
close to being this good, this thought provoking, or this moving. Mitski
Miyawaki, five albums into her relatively short career, has made the kind of
artistic statement that some performers spend their whole lives trying to
create.
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